Stockholm Syndrome

3:42am is the worst time of night.
Long since the world has gone to sleep,
sufficiently removed from the last words and actions of the day
that the mind settles down to equilibrium.
Can't bring yourself to go to bed
despite counting on one hand
the hours until waking.

It is the purest-feeling emotion of all,
that smooth relentless ache.
All other sensations are intense but fleeting,
naught but reaction to stimuli.
3:42am is the baseline of your mind.

And, being wholly immersed in
(and enamored of—for who doesn't love
a good terminal-wanderer hero?)
this terrible condition,
you set out in vain every night to capture it in words.
But by 3:42am literary powers are stymied
sleep-starved and atrophied.

The daylight trooper gazes listless
through the electric incandescence
and the heroin-white paper stares back.